Spare, poetic storytelling conveys a tender, bare-bones depiction of personal growth, told simply enough to engage young and...
In her first contribution to the growing genre of graphic memoir, syndicated cartoonist Henley (Laughing Gas, 2002, etc.) recounts the life-altering events following her decision to adopt a child in her late 40s.
The narrative begins with the author informing her family in Texas that a six-month-old Russian boy named Sergey was waiting for her to claim him from an orphanage in St. Petersburg. Henley’s simple pen-and-ink drawings humorously illustrate her trepidation in telling loved ones of her plans to adopt and effectively convey the many trying moments resulting from her decision. It precipitated a reevaluation of what had become a long-distance relationship with longtime boyfriend Rick, and also coincided with a rapid decline in her father’s health. Henley excels in illustrating the intangibles of experience. One of the most frequent states in which she found herself was that of waiting. “I waited…and waited…and waited” for the adoption agency to update her on Sergey’s status, Henley writes; the words appear in frames showing her brushing up on Russian grammar, listlessly washing dishes and doing a headstand in yoga class. Similarly, after Sergey’s adoption fell through and her father continued to linger in the hospital, the author indicates the passage of time with a single picture depicting the phases of the moon, captioned, “There was nothing to say anyway.” Henley’s illustrations richly detail her inaction, and her dynamic narrative flows seamlessly and can easily be devoured in one sitting.
Spare, poetic storytelling conveys a tender, bare-bones depiction of personal growth, told simply enough to engage young and old alike.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-446-19931-5
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Springboard Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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